1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure relates generally to data access and analysis and, more specifically, to a system and method for accessing data objects via remote references.
2. Description of the Related Art
Software applications, such as financial analysis applications, allow users to create and interact with large software data objects. Such data objects organize data relevant to the software application and provide methods that allow operations to be performed on the data.
Typically, a data object accessed by a software application is resident within the memory of the computing device that is allocated to the software application. Large data objects occupy significant portions of the memory allocated to the software application. Thus, a software application that accesses a significant number of data objects, especially large data objects, needs a large amount of memory for storing the data objects. In most cases, memory that is available to a software application is limited, and, in such scenarios, a software application, when accessing large data objects, can suffer performance degradation as well as encounter errors related to out-of-memory exceptions.
As the foregoing illustrates, what is needed in the art is a mechanism for accessing large data objects without occupying significant amount of memory space allocated to the software application.